This post contains full-book SPOILERS for Alix E. Harrow’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January. Here is the non-spoiler post.
Before I get into the major spoilers: the dog lives.
What bothered me is the tying of the looting of worlds and closing of Doors into larger oppressions. As Mr. Locke says to January in his villain recruitment speech,
Think about the good of the world, January! Think about what these “doors”—fractures, we call them, or aberrations—promote: disruption, madness, magic… they overturn order. I’ve seen a world without order, defined by constant competition for power and wealth, by the cruelties of change.
(January isn’t the person to challenge this remarkable statement by reference to capitalism.)
Then Locke blames the Indian Rebellion of 1857 on a Door:
I went around to every mutineer I could find—which wasn’t many, as the captain had been firing them from cannons—and all of them told me the same story: an old Bengali woman in Meerut had slipped through a strange archway and returned twelve days later. She had spoken with some sort of oracular creature that told her she and all her people would one day be free from foreign rule. And so they’d taken up arms against us.
As a result, he started the organization that became the New England Archaeological Society with the goal of closing the Doors. And one of the Society’s members tells January, “it’s been working. Empires are growing. Profits are rising. Revolutionaries and rabble-rousers are thin on the ground.”
I am extremely disturbed that actual historical actions of resistance are, in this book, instead caused by a single person’s fantastical (i.e., made up) experience.
I wondered if perhaps Locke was incorrectly attributing these “disruptions” to the Doors, which would be very in-character. But no. Here’s January’s end-of-book narration:
I intend, after all, to spend the rest of my life diving in and out of the wild in-between—finding the thin, overlooked places that connect worlds, following the trail of locked Doors the Society left behind and writing them back open. Letting all the dangerous, beautiful madness flow freely between worlds again. […]
If you’re some stranger who stumbled over this book by chance […] I hope to every god you have the guts to do what needs doing. I hope you will find the cracks in the world and wedge them wider, so the light of other suns shines through; I hope you will keep the world unruly, messy, full of strange magics; I hope you will run through every open Door and tell stories when you return.
I mean, yes, the second paragraph is metaphorically about the need for open minds and the power of storytelling, and that’s all very well and good. But the first paragraph also makes the metaphor literal with its Doors that let “dangerous, beautiful madness flow freely between worlds,” and then we’re right back to the same problem of the Indian Rebellion: we don’t need to go through fantasy portals to understand the need for resistance, as demonstrated by the entire course of history right up to this very second. This version of the fantasy of political agency is actually undermining real-life political agency, current and historical. And that (a) shows the power of this standard plotline and the danger of not thoroughly interrogating it and (b) renders me unable to like this book.